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Author: Carola Lentz
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253060184
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 294
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Book Description
What keeps a family together? In Imagining Futures, authors Carola Lentz and Isidore Lobnibe offer a unique look at one extended African family, currently comprising over five hundred members in Northern Ghana and Burkina Faso. Members of this extended family, like many others in the region, find themselves living increasingly farther apart and working in diverse occupations ranging from religious clergy and civil service to farming. What keeps them together as a family? In their groundbreaking work, Lentz and Lobnibe argue that shared memories, rather than only material interests, bind a family together. Imagining Futures explores the changing practices of remembering in an African family and offers a unique contribution to the growing field of memory studies, beyond the usual focus of Europe and America. Lentz and Lobnibe explore how, in an increasingly globalized, postcolonial world, memories themselves are not static accounts of past events but are actually malleable and shaped by both current concerns and imagined futures.
Author: Carola Lentz
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253060184
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 294
Get Book Here
Book Description
What keeps a family together? In Imagining Futures, authors Carola Lentz and Isidore Lobnibe offer a unique look at one extended African family, currently comprising over five hundred members in Northern Ghana and Burkina Faso. Members of this extended family, like many others in the region, find themselves living increasingly farther apart and working in diverse occupations ranging from religious clergy and civil service to farming. What keeps them together as a family? In their groundbreaking work, Lentz and Lobnibe argue that shared memories, rather than only material interests, bind a family together. Imagining Futures explores the changing practices of remembering in an African family and offers a unique contribution to the growing field of memory studies, beyond the usual focus of Europe and America. Lentz and Lobnibe explore how, in an increasingly globalized, postcolonial world, memories themselves are not static accounts of past events but are actually malleable and shaped by both current concerns and imagined futures.
Author: Constance de Saint-Laurent
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319760513
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 301
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Book Description
It is a commonly held assumption among cultural, social, and political psychologists that imagining the future of societies we live in has the potential to change how we think and act in the world. However little research has been devoted to whether this effect exists in collective imaginations, of social groups, communities and nations, for instance. This book explores the part that imagination and creativity play in the construction of collective futures, and the diversity of outlets in which these are presented, from fiction and cultural symbols to science and technology. The authors discuss this effect in social phenomena such as in intergroup conflict and social change, and focus on several cases studies to illustrate how the imagination of collective futures can guide social and political action. This book brings together theoretical and empirical contributions from cultural, social, and political psychology to offer insight into our constant (re)imagination of the societies in which we live.
Author: Jens Beckert
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674545893
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 384
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Book Description
In a capitalist system, consumers, investors, and corporations orient their activities toward a future that contains opportunities and risks. How actors assess uncertainty is a problem that economists have tried to solve through general equilibrium and rational expectations theory. Powerful as these analytical tools are, they underestimate the future’s unknowability by assuming that markets, in the aggregate, correctly forecast what is to come. Jens Beckert adds a new chapter to the theory of capitalism by demonstrating how fictional expectations drive modern economies—or throw them into crisis when the imagined futures fail to materialize. Collectively held images of how the future will unfold are critical because they free economic actors from paralyzing doubt, enabling them to commit resources and coordinate decisions even if those expectations prove inaccurate. Beckert distinguishes fictional expectations from performativity theory, which holds that predictions tend to become self-fulfilling prophecies. Economic forecasts are important not because they produce the futures they envision but because they create the expectations that generate economic activity in the first place. Actors pursue money, investments, innovations, and consumption only if they believe the objects obtained through market exchanges will retain value. We accept money because we believe in its future purchasing power. We accept the risk of capital investments and innovation because we expect profit. And we purchase consumer goods based on dreams of satisfaction. As Imagined Futures shows, those who ignore the role of real uncertainty and fictional expectations in market dynamics misunderstand the nature of capitalism.
Author: Helen Stokes
Publisher: Melbourne Univ. Publishing
ISBN: 0522860958
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 138
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Book Description
Young people consider their future at a stage of life when the structure and relative certainty of school and further education are about to be left behind. This book provides an insight into how young people see themselves, the options they think are available to them and the strategies they use to make their imagined futures possible. Ultimately, Imagining Futures is about identity. It draws on the real-life stories and voices of a range of young people—many of whom are in their final years of secondary school or TAFE—to present an eye-opening portrait who they are, who they aim to become and how.
Author: Gert Verschraegen
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1315440830
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 237
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Book Description
Imagining, forecasting and predicting the future is an inextricable and increasingly important part of the present. States, organizations and individuals almost continuously have to make decisions about future actions, financial investments or technological innovation, without much knowledge of what will exactly happen in the future. Science and technology play a crucial role in this collective attempt to make sense of the future. Technological developments such as nanotechnology, robotics or solar energy largely shape how we dream and think about the future, while economic forecasts, gene tests or climate change projections help us to make images of what may possibly occur in the future. This book provides one of the first interdisciplinary assessments of how scientific and technological imaginations matter in the formation of human, ecological and societal futures. Rooted in different disciplines such as sociology, philosophy, and science and technology studies, it explores how various actors such as scientists, companies or states imagine the future to be and act upon that imagination. Bringing together case studies from different regions around the globe, including the electrification of German car infrastructure, or genetically modified crops in India, Imagined Futures in Science, Technology and Society shows how science and technology create novel forms of imagination, thereby opening horizons toward alternative futures. By developing central aspects of the current debate on how scientific imagination and future-making interact, this timely volume provides a fresh look at the complex interrelationships between science, technology and society. This book will be of interest to postgraduate students interested in Science and Technology Studies, History and Philosophy of Science, Sociology, Cultural Studies, Anthropology, Political Sciences, Future Studies and Literary Sciences.
Author: Carl Abbott
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 0819576727
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
What science fiction can teach us about urban planning Carl Abbott, who has taught urban studies and urban planning in five decades, brings together urban studies and literary studies to examine how fictional cities in work by authors as different as E. M. Forster, Isaac Asimov, Kim Stanley Robinson, and China Miéville might help us to envision an urban future that is viable and resilient. Imagining Urban Futures is a remarkable treatise on what is best and strongest in urban theory and practice today, as refracted and intensely imagined in science fiction. As the human population grows, we can envision an increasingly urban society. Shifting weather patterns, rising sea levels, reduced access to resources, and a host of other issues will radically impact urban environments, while technology holds out the dream of cities beyond Earth. Abbott delivers a compelling critical discussion of science fiction cities found in literary works, television programs, and films of many eras from Metropolis to Blade Runner and Soylent Green to The Hunger Games, among many others.
Author: Gordon Hughes
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134676794
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 183
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Book Description
Imagining Welfare Futures explores possible futures of welfare by considering different types of relationship between the public and the state through which social welfare may be organized beyond the millennium. By drawing on contemporary debates about the 'citizen', 'the community' and 'the consumer', the book explores what each of these imaginary figures might mean for the next generation of welfare users.
Author: Carola Lentz
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253060192
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 335
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Book Description
What keeps a family together? In Imagining Futures, authors Carola Lentz and Isidore Lobnibe offer a unique look at one extended African family, currently comprising over five hundred members in Northern Ghana and Burkina Faso. Members of this extended family, like many others in the region, find themselves living increasingly farther apart and working in diverse occupations ranging from religious clergy and civil service to farming. What keeps them together as a family? In their groundbreaking work, Lentz and Lobnibe argue that shared memories, rather than only material interests, bind a family together. Imagining Futures explores the changing practices of remembering in an African family and offers a unique contribution to the growing field of memory studies, beyond the usual focus of Europe and America. Lentz and Lobnibe explore how, in an increasingly globalized, postcolonial world, memories themselves are not static accounts of past events but are actually malleable and shaped by both current concerns and imagined futures.
Author: Kum-Kum Bhavnani
Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.
ISBN: 178360641X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 267
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Book Description
Straddling disciplines and continents, Feminist Futures interweaves scholarship and social activism to explore the evolving position of women in the South. Working at the intersection of cultural studies, critical development studies and feminist theory, the book's contributors articulate a radical and innovative framework for understanding the linkages between women, culture and development, applying it to issues ranging from sexuality and the gendered body to the environment, technology and the cultural politics of representation. This revised and updated edition brings together leading academics, as well as a new generation of activists and scholars, to provide a fresh perspective on the ways in which women in the South are transforming our understanding of development.
Author: Benjamin K. Sovacool
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429633998
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 271
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Book Description
This book examines the visions, fantasies, frames, discourses, imaginaries, and expectations associated with six state-of-the-art energy systems—nuclear power, hydrogen fuel cells, shale gas, clean coal, smart meters, and electric vehicles—playing a key role in current deliberations about low-carbon energy supply and use. Visions of Energy Futures: Imagining and Innovating Low-Carbon Transitions unveils what the future of energy systems could look like, and how their meanings are produced, often alongside moments of contestation. Theoretically, it analyzes these technological case studies with emerging concepts from various disciplines: utopianism (history of technology), symbolic convergence (communication studies), technological frames (social construction of technology), discursive coalitions (discourse analysis and linguistics), sociotechnical imaginaries (science and technology studies), and the sociology of expectations (innovation studies, future studies). It draws from these cases to create a synthetic set of dichotomies and frameworks for energy futures based on original data collected across two global epistemic communities— nuclear physicists and hydrogen engineers—and experts in Eastern Europe and the Nordic region, stakeholders in South Africa, and newspapers in the United Kingdom. This book is motivated by the premise that tackling climate change via low-carbon energy systems and practices is one of the most significant challenges of the twenty-first century, and that success will require not only new energy technologies, but also new ways of understanding language, visions, and discursive politics. The discursive creation of the energy systems of tomorrow are propagated in polity, hoping to be realized as the material fact of the future, but processed in conflicting ways with underlying tensions as to how contemporary societies ought to be ordered. This book will be essential reading for students and scholars of energy policy, energy and environment, and technology assessment.
